Patch 5.2 - Cross-Realm Patch 5.0 Raids
Ghostcrawler confirmed that the old Patch 5.0 raids will all be cross-realm once Patch 5.2 is live.

OpenRaid Reminder
Now that cross-realm Patch 5.0 raids are confirmed, this might be a good time to remind everyone about OpenRaid. It is a site that allows you to easily form cross-realm groups for PvP and PvE content. Currently you can do all of the old WoW content, except for Mists of Pandaria raids.

It is an easy way to grab nice meta achievement mounts like the the Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquisher or Ironbound Proto-Drake, as well as transmog gear, chances at mounts that drop from old raids, and even a way to finish getting the drops for your old legendary item! You can also find some Challenge Mode groups and RBG groups as well.

Once Patch 5.2 is live, it will provide an opportunity to gear up your characters faster by running the Patch 5.0 raids in Normal or Heroic difficulty. Doing Normal difficulty will give you higher item level loot, extra chances at loot compared to just running LFR, and help you to catch up on the legendary quest line, so that you can get your legendary meta gem sooner!

PTR Class and Set Bonus Issues

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Soo, in short you just nerfed us ele shamans so we can swich targets easly?
There was no nerf. Sorry if my explanation was unclear. Lava Burst with Flame Shock should do exactly the same damage it does on live. Lava Burst without Flame Shock will do more damage than it does on live. It is a buff to unfavorable situations.

Now all that said, Elemental's damage is still low. I didn't want that message to Distract players from the Lava Burst change. I also didn't want players to campaign for just buffing the heck out of Lava Burst, because that would have done damage to the rotation and PvP. Instead, we want to buff Elemental evenly. Imagine a Shamanism buff if you must until we decide the actual change.

Rogue 4 piece is COMPLETELY useless for combat. We already energy cap during Ad Rush, so giving us more energy during Shadow Blades does nothing, as de-coupling Ad Rush/Shadow Blades appears to be a DPS loss even with the 4 piece. I thought the goal was to boost combat single target damage in 5.2. Guess not.
We would need to see some numbers on this. If you hate to decouple the two CDs then I could see how it would be a problem. But decoupling them and using the set bonus should be a DPS increase.

Go back to the start, start with the principle of "Basic rotation is MS->OP->OP->X" and "Sometimes you will prioritize Slam over OP when you are running high on rage", and figure out how to make it work from there. As it is, always having OP always taking priority over all the other fillers leaves the rotation feeling too cramped and awkward, and takes all rage management out of the rotation, leaving us with no choices except hitting HS when we can't spend enough rage with the default rotation.
The intent is Mortal Strike -> Overpower with Slam used during Colossus Smash or during moments of excess rage.

We tried the change to Overpower proc'ing Sudden Death with noble intentions of making the rotation more dynamic since CS would be slightly more predictable. However, the change isn't a clear win, so we're not sure it's a good change. We are likely to go back to autoattacks proc Sudden Death, but leaving the 1 GCD on Overpower. We are also intrigued by the idea of having Opportunity Strike (mastery) also proc Sudden Death, so we might run some numbers on that. The buff to Deep Wounds, mastery and haste should all help with Arms scaling (though we remain convinced that players often focus much too much on scaling and not on overall DPS).

Do you not have the ability in-house to test this?
Of course we do. But we're not seeing what you're seeing. Therefore we need to understand the source of the difference.

We are sympathetic to the argument that we have been schizophrenic (to use the term incorrectly) in the Shadow PvP 4pc VT dispel bonus. Originally the enemy strategy was to just "get it over with" and dispel VT until the horror went on DR. We changed the way dispels work so that isn't much of a strategy these days, however the dispel is still in the hands of the enemy and not the Shadow priest, which we agree makes the DR extra punitive. We also think we've hit Shadow hard enough in PvP that this nerf isn't required, so we're going to remove the DR from the Horror proc from VT dispels.

We haven't forgotten to have Solace provide a heal for Holy. That's still in the cards.

We think we understand the rogue concerns on the PvE 4pc better now. We don't mind Combat having to unlink AR and SB to maximize the bonus, and we still think the set bonus is a DPS increase over not having it. However, it may be the case that the value of the set bonus forces Combat to swap to another spec because the cooldown stacking is one of the mechanics that keeps Combat competitive. To try to (ahem) combat this, we are going to do something unusual and allow the set bonus to also reduce the global cooldown on rogue abilities to 0.7 sec during Shadow Blades. This should help prevent GCD lock / energy capping. Normally we are very reluctant to reduce the GCD lower than 1 sec, so this is very much an experiment.

DPS Tuning

We continue to tweak Arcane numbers, so if you're trying to theorycraft Arcane, you may want to hold on for a bit longer. At the moment, we have restored Arcane Charge back to +50% damage and +150% mana cost but reduced the damage of Arcane Blast (-22.2%), Arcane Missiles (-22.2%) and Arcane Barrage (-13.6%).

Likewise, I wouldn't worry about the details of monk numbers, especially healing, too much yet. If you want to keep track however, here are recent changes: Mana cost of glyph of Uplift +21%, Mana cost of Jab +33%, Teachings of the Monastery now provides 2% mana to Tiger Palm, Reduced T15 4pc from -5 sec cooldown on Thunder Focus Tea.

Here's the followup question then. Will this Disable the AR glyph? That brings Combat to a .5s GCD with the glyph if they're stacked.
They will stack. As I said, it's an experiment.

Could you possibly speak on this subject? It feels like the tier is designed exclusively for Holy, and that makes me sad.
We've been searching for some hard numbers (key phrase there) on secondary stat values for Disc with the 5.2 changes, but so far we can't find much discussion out there beyond "Well, I guess we might want more crit so PoH will give DA again." If you know of any we might not have seen (another key phrase there), let us know.

Below are the scary guts of the new trinkets and metagems. This information is for theorycrafters. You don't need to read this to understand how the mechanics work or enjoy their benefits.

This will make us mistweaver only use Jab in combo with TP or we will loss so much mana.
Yes. To oversimplify, we don't want Jab, Jab, Uplift, nor do we want Soothe, Soothe, Tiger Palm. We want Fistweaving to provide significant damage and healing, but both should be less than an actual DPS spec or a traditional healer (again Atonement is the model). Fistweaving will be awesome for some situations, but we want it to be a compromise, otherwise, you'd want monks for all your healers, since you get all this bonus DPS on the side for no healing cost. In order to deliver on this, we have to make it harder to cherry pick some Fistweaving abilities and some Mistweaving abilities.

I question why Rogues are getting 0.7 GCD consideration while Feral is stuck weaving 1.5sec GCD heals into their DPS rotation.Cat Form has reduced the GCD of spells to 1.0 sec for a few builds now. As I've said, the rogue GCD change is very much an experiment. If it doesn't work out, it's one set bonus that will eventually be replaced. This should not open the gates for everyone requesting microscopic GCDs for their spec. At the end of the day, we have a client-server architecture and the GCD provides time for data communication back and forth.

Why is the PPM different by spec considering that realPPM is supposed to give every class/spec roughly the same proc rate already?
Three reasons. A) RealPPM procs still scale more frequently with haste, which many specs have drastically more or less of. B) The proc that it gives you in this case scales directly with AP, which many specs have drastically more or less of. C) It’s not terribly uncommon for A or B (but not usually both) to occur on a trinket, and we can swallow that much variance. And there are typically other options for trinkets if one underperforms for you; there isn’t here, and we want the legendary metagems to be equally awesome for everyone. As a sidenote, we didn’t do that spec variance yet for the Sinister (caster DPS) one, but are still considering doing so. The situation there doesn’t seem quite as skewed as it did for the physical DPS, so we haven’t yet, but still very well might.

Can you at least clarify how Rune of Re-Origination would work? Wording on the trinket is not very clear.
Warning: technical mumbo jumbo follows.

At proc time, it checks how much crit, haste, and mastery you have (yes, this is a snapshot, and does NOT include the mastery raid buff). It finds which is the highest of those 3 (tie breaking rule: crit trumps haste trumps mastery), and gives you a buff of +[sum of lowest two stats] to your highest stat, and -[lowest stat A] and -[lowest stat B]. For example, if you have 6000 mastery, 3000 crit, 2000 haste, and the proc goes off, it gives you a buff that provides [+5000 mastery, -3000 crit, -2000 haste]. It does not continue adjusting that buff as stats change during its duration. Yes, this means that if you have a temporary buff to a stat that is not your highest (even with the temporary buff), and that temporary buff falls off during Re-Origination, you *could* end up with negative rating. In this obscure edge case, negative crit does reduce your crit chance, negative mastery does reduce whatever it normally does, and negative haste is ignored.

What's the rate for specs not mentioned in the list for the Capacitive Primal Diamond? Examples include Blood DKs, Prot Warriors/Paladins.
Just the base 15.00 RealPPM.

Why does the trinket note that it can stack if the RPPM isn't high enough to allow it to in the first place?
RealPPM isn’t an ICD. Note that the stacking Agi trinket is only 10 sec duration, whereas the stacking Str trinket is 20 sec duration. And remember that haste increases the frequency of procs. Neither of these is expected to stay at max stacks very much of the time. It’s more that it can quite often proc again while it’s already up and by letting it stack, that becomes an awesome occurrence, rather than a disappointing one.

One concern from Mistweavers when dealing with Capacitive Primal Diamond is that the Conductive proc would affect Eminence.
Yes, the Lightning Strike should trigger Eminence. We don’t expect that to be particularly worthwhile though.

Raid Testing Schedule - February 14-15

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

On Thursday, February 14, and Friday, February 15, we will be testing more raid encounters in the Throne of Thunder.

Each encounter should be available at approximately the listed times below for all Public Test Realms.

As always, this testing schedule is very fluid and subject to the realities of a beta environment. We might have to change the time of a testing session, change the boss being tested, or cancel a test entirely, due to bugs, server hardware issues, etc. Keep an eye on this forum for the latest information, and thank you in advance for testing and providing feedback.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Noblegarden Comes Early to the PTR
Noblegarden is coming to the PTR a little early for testing. Be sure to hop in and give it a try!

Why? What have you done? What do you know?
Just a little bug testing. We just wanted to give people a heads-up in case they start to wonder why Noblegarden has sprung up. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

5.2 Update: You Can Keep Your Valor!You can get reputation by raiding? For a different faction than the Shado-Pan Assault? How does that work?
Yes. No.
Only works for Shado-Pan Assault, sorry if I wasn't clear enough on my original post.

I don't care about saving valor, since as you said, we will have to do quite a bunch of raid before we can buy something good to use. In other words, we probably will have enough valor when we are able to buy something.

Actually there are items at each reputation, even neutral, and getting to Friendly is (I believe) essentially just a single boss kill. It ramps up from there obviously, but you will have stuff to spend Valor on pretty quickly.

So you do me like this, the day AFTER I spent 750 valor on my lock and priest so it won't be wasted just in case the patch was soon? You OWE me my valor back. When do I get it refunded?
I'm not sure what you're owed. You knew what you were spending points on and got what you paid for.

This is why we so often repeat with every patch that things are subject to change during development and testing. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Failbag Rewards In 5.2 - Thoughts?
The change is still in for the failbags to ... not be fail. They'll have a chance to contain things like very valuable grey items (essentially randomizing the gold you get from the bags), LFR versions of non-boss loot, Spirits of Harmony, consumables, pets and mounts, and... maybe some other stuff I forgot. Lots of things! Opening them should have some anticipation and surprise now.

Can you clarify what you mean by "LFR versions of non-boss loot" though? Do you mean ilvl scaled up 5man loot?
Meaning items that drop off "trash". Greens and blues and such. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

It's lack of popularity for players doing EU PVP means there are little or no PVP events scheduled. There is no option for RBG or Arena. I realise it has "Raid" in the title but adding support for Arena shouldn't be a problem.

Only me who noticed, that the Malevolent gear gets nerfed from Conq to honor? The gear has much lower sta per item.

AFAIR, this has not happened before?

true,
your primary stats are lower (strenght, agil, stamina, intel) but your pvp power / pvp resiliance has increased on the 476 items.
The only way to be "on par" with the 483 ilvl is to give 'm upgrades.
I think in the original 483 ilvl vs 476 ilvl ; the 476 wins with the resliance / pvppower upgrade.

It's lack of popularity for players doing EU PVP means there are little or no PVP events scheduled. There is no option for RBG or Arena. I realise it has "Raid" in the title but adding support for Arena shouldn't be a problem.

Why search for Arena on a additional website since you can't do it CR? You have trade/general (Other?) And Wows Realm forum. And talking about RBGs, no there isnt many pvp players for that on the website, there is tho some groups going weekly. Before Blizzard banned AVEnable the PVP section on the website was really big for running BGs, getting achivments etc. With the banning of the addon the section died, there is tho easier way to find RBGs, OQueue or #rbg.eu on irc or try their website to sign in.

Am I the only one who sees the use trinkets have about 50% less effect than 5.1 malev? Example; strength trinket on use, 2300 str, current malev; 5100 on use? Are they downscaling trinkets to prevent CD stacking?

Am I the only one who sees the use trinkets have about 50% less effect than 5.1 malev? Example; strength trinket on use, 2300 str, current malev; 5100 on use? Are they downscaling trinkets to prevent CD stacking?

Blizzard sucks! How will I manage to kill healers now! I'm quitting this game now!

openraid is fucking bullshit their their times is fucking rediculious, I missed all 3 raids I was queue, so fuck those scrub developers, not gonna use this shit website, and oh those raidleaders u have no achiv so fuck u and stfu we won't take you, coz we want better people to get boosted myself...
and for pvp u have oqueue addon it work like a charm
and wtf blizzard 476pvp items with better stats then 491 upgraded?! gg
and ofc buff mages again..

---------- Post added 2013-02-14 at 03:30 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Hiffchakka

Am I the only one who sees the use trinkets have about 50% less effect than 5.1 malev? Example; strength trinket on use, 2300 str, current malev; 5100 on use? Are they downscaling trinkets to prevent CD stacking?

Blizzard sucks! How will I manage to kill healers now! I'm quitting this game now!

it is 2k of stats already like 3 mounth, l2read hotfixes, it was just tooltip ,which need client patching to change discription on item iteself

openraid is fucking bullshit their their times is fucking rediculious, I missed all 3 raids I was queue, so fuck those scrub developers, not gonna use this shit website, and oh those raidleaders u have no achiv so fuck u and stfu we won't take you, coz we want better people to get boosted myself...
and for pvp u have oqueue addon it work like a charm
and wtf blizzard 476pvp items with better stats then 491 upgraded?! gg
and ofc buff mages again..

---------- Post added 2013-02-14 at 03:30 PM ----------

it is 2k of stats already like 3 mounth, l2read hotfixes, it was just tooltip ,which need client patching to change discription on item iteself

openraid is fucking bullshit their their times is fucking rediculious, I missed all 3 raids I was queue, so fuck those scrub developers, not gonna use this shit website, and oh those raidleaders u have no achiv so fuck u and stfu we won't take you, coz we want better people to get boosted myself...
and for pvp u have oqueue addon it work like a charm
and wtf blizzard 476pvp items with better stats then 491 upgraded?! gg
and ofc buff mages again..

There there Mr. Zstr, I dont really think it's the sites fault that you missed 3 raids you were sign up for. The site has always used the CET and probably always will. And I can't really tell if you are serious enough for you are just 'Trolling' but raidleaders just taking good people? Well there is two exemptions for that, one being running like ICC with 5-6 people, you want the best people for that, instead of 1 being super-good and boosting the rest.
In my weekly runs I'll accept everyone who forfill the REQ to join my raids, so do allmost everyone. With the exemptions of farming rare mounts which you can do with 5-6 people, there for you only take the best people instead of boosting someone.

So I can just say, GL and I'm glad that you're not using the website anymore, people with your attitude should not be welcomed anyway, please behave. (Even if, it is on the internet)

openraid is fucking bullshit their their times is fucking rediculious, I missed all 3 raids I was queue, so fuck those scrub developers, not gonna use this shit website, and oh those raidleaders u have no achiv so fuck u and stfu we won't take you, coz we want better people to get boosted myself...
and for pvp u have oqueue addon it work like a charm
and wtf blizzard 476pvp items with better stats then 491 upgraded?! gg
and ofc buff mages again..

---------- Post added 2013-02-14 at 03:30 PM ----------

it is 2k of stats already like 3 mounth, l2read hotfixes, it was just tooltip ,which need client patching to change discription on item iteself

At least you have a well organized and logical argument....wait...I think I lost too many brain cells..

Originally Posted by wombinator04

$6 for a game made in 1993? If it was free then maybe I would buy it instead of pirating it.